You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Everyday life in the East German Socialist Unity Party revolved heavily around maintaining the “party line” in all areas of society, whether through direct authority or corruption. Spanning a long period of the GDR’s history, from 1946 through 1989, Rüdiger Bergien presents the first study that examines the complexities of the central party’s communist apparatus. He focuses on their role as ideological watchdogs, as they fostered an underbelly and “inner life” for their employees to integrate the party’s pillars throughout East German society. Inside Party Headquarters reviews not only the party’s modes power and state interaction, but also the processes of negotiation and disputation preceding formal Politburo decisions, advancing the available detail and discourse surrounding this formative and volatile stretch of German history.
Since the 1970s, various sociological approaches have tried to understand and conceptualize "the global," yet few of them have systematically addressed the full spectrum of social relationships. Prominent exponents of the global approach - such as world systems analysis - instead have focused on particular domains such as politics or the economy. Under the label of "world society," however, some authors have suggested alternatives to the predominant equivocation of society and the nation-state. The contributions to this volume share that objective and take their point of departure from the two most ambitious projects of a theory of world society: world polity research and systems theory, mapping out the common ground and assessing their potential to inform empirical analyses of globalization.
Michael Bommes (1954–2010) was one the most brilliant and original scholars of migration studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This posthumously published collection brings together a selection of his most important essays on immigration, transnationalism, irregular migration, and migrant networks. “In Bommes, the academy lost a scholar with penetrating analyses of migration, the welfare state and social systems where the two interact. By completing his last project, Boswell and D'Amato have done scholarship a lasting service. A major contribution to public debate and a tribute to a very great man.”—Randall Hansen, University of Toronto
This engaging and timely book demonstrates how a deeper understanding of theories about organizations are necessary for the development of a relational sociology and provides an in-depth explanation of globalization and social change. It also examines how social bonds are constructed through combinations of different forms of communication and investigates the bonds of intimate relationships and partially organized relationships such as street gangs, brotherhoods, and social movements.
The growing number of user-generated content that can be found online has led to a huge amount of data that can be used for scientific research. This book investigates the prediction of certain human-related events using valences and emotions expressed in user-generated content with regard to past and current research. First, the theoretical framework of user-generated content and sentiment detection- and classification methods is explained, before empirical literature is categorized into three specific prediction subjects. This is followed by a comprehensive analysis including a comparison of prediction methods, consistency, and limitations with respect to each of the three predictive sources.
Network research in the social sciences has successfully followed a structuralist approach where social phenomena are studied with regard to the pattern of relations between actors. These patterns of relations - social networks - are seen as the decisive level of social structures. Otherfeatures like formal roles, cultural norms, and values, are treated as secondary. As such, the field of social network research is currently divided between technically sophisticated analyses and complex, elusive theorizing.In Social Networks of Meaning and Communication, Jan Fuhse offers a coherent theory of social structures as networks of relations interwoven with meaning. Drawing upon and extending the cu...
An examination of corporate privacy management in the United States, Germany, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom, identifying international best practices and making policy recommendations. Barely a week goes by without a new privacy revelation or scandal. Whether by hackers or spy agencies or social networks, violations of our personal information have shaken entire industries, corroded relations among nations, and bred distrust between democratic governments and their citizens. Polls reflect this concern, and show majorities for more, broader, and stricter regulation—to put more laws “on the books.” But there was scant evidence of how well tighter regulation actually worked “on ...
Money makes the world go round - corruption The book presents the state of the art in studying the causes of corruption from a comparative perspective. Leading scholars in the field of corruption analysis shed light on the issue of corruption from different theoretical perspectives. Understanding how different theories define, conceptualize, and eventually deduce policy recommendations will amplify our understanding of the complexity of this social phenomenon and illustrate the spectrum of possibilities to deal with it analytically as well as practically.
A comparison of immigrant integration policies in seven federal countries in light of constitutional structures, ethno-cultural composition and political trends.
In recent years, Romanians have become the second largest migrant group in Western Europe. Following the liberalization of border controls and the massive economic and political changes in Eastern Europe, human mobility has increased and is becoming a permanent feature of post-Cold War Europe. The arrival of many Eastern Europeans, with Romanians being the largest migrant group, has produced public concerns on immigration in some West European countries. This is particularly the case in Italy, where Romanian irregular migrants are often stigmatized as poor troublemakers by authorities and the mass media. This book challenges such commonly-held assumptions that artificially divide migrants in...